Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films

At UbuWeb you can find the audio of Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films (1956-1978). This was a precursor to Creel Pone - a series of six unofficial CD-R compilations of the electronic and tape-music soundtracks to experimental animations and films, released by the New England Electric Music Company. Many or most had never appeared as isolated audio outside their filmic context. 

Some of these films have appeared earlier on this blog. A few more are added below. 

Tom Dissevelt – Glass (1959) directed by Bert Haanstra

Gershon Kingsley – Pixillation (1971) directed by Lillian Schwartz

Percy Grainger – Free Music (1970), director unknown

Pierre Boulez – Symphonie Mechanique (1955), directed by Jean Mitry

Joan La Barbara – Dance Frame (1978), directed by Doris Chase

Bernard Parmegiani – Jeux Des Anges (1964), directed by Walerian Borowczyk

Włodzimierz Kotoński – Dom (1958), directed by Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica

Pierre Henry – Les Amours De La Pleuvre (1967), directed by Jean Painlevé & Geneviève Hamon

Włodzimierz Kotoński – Labyrinthe (1963), directed by directed by Jan Lenica

Bernard Parmegiani – Steinberg (1966), directed by directed by Kassovitz

Bernard Parmegiani – L'Arraignelephant (1967), directed by Piotr Kamler

Robert Cohen-Solal – Délicieuse Catastrophe (1970), directed by Piotr Kamler

Bernard Parmegiani – Le Pas (1975), directed by Piotr Kamler

Bernard Parmegiani – L'Écran Transparent (1973), directed by Bernard Parmegiani

Here's Andy Beta's write-up of some of the earlier volumes: 

An amazing collection of crucial and lost slivers of both celluloid and sound, from right along the rim of the memory hole.

Tom Dissevelt's soundtrack to "Glas" (dir. Henstra, 1959) is almost like an Henri Chopin poem, with weird squeals and reverberating breaths and crackling radio voices intoning with dreadful menace among the cycling noises. Turns out to be about glass-blowing, go figure.

Gershon Kingsley provides a percolating soundtrack to "Pixillation" (dir. Schwartz, 1971), which shouldn't be too much a surprise for those familiar with his duo work with Perrey on The In Sound from Way Out. Very reminiscent of a coherent Sun Ra moog fugue and the most funky and taciturn of the entire set by far. 

"Free Music" from 1970, has Percy Grainger taffy-pulling some gossamer sound waves that thicken in a brief two minutes. 

The biggest name of volume one is Pierre Boulez, contributing his one and only electronic music piece to "Symphonie Mechanique" (dir. Mitry, 1956). It is an incredibly violatile magnetic tape piece that shimmers at a frentic pace, as if Raymond Scott and Xenakis are brainstorming sound ideas at the same time. 

A highlight of the set, as is Joan LaBarbara's piece. Probably more renowned as a 20th Century contemporary vocalist, along the lineage of Cathy Berberian, here she provides the pouring water, alien-lipped trills, and revolving rhythmic flutters for "Dance Frame" (dir. Chase, 1978), and it is vertiginous and brain-vaporising in its overall effect. 

The second volume brings forth two pieces by director Valerian Borowczyk, one being an historical soundtrack by Bernard Parmegiani for "Jeux des Anges" (1964). Roaring blindly with electric intrusions, it reveals itself to be the sounds of trains passing, slowing into drones of electromagnetic fields and distorted piano (or are they organ?) keys, which merge and split apart. Voices gurgle in with a percussion sound not unlike dropped microphones at the track's end. Noisy, and a very primitive bit from one of the future masters. 

Polish composer Wlodzimierz Kotonski's piece for "Dom" (1957) is flittering bits of key strikes and metallophone clops, swirling about each other with birdcall electronics. Percussion and metal scratching seeds the middle section, as more tape sounds swoop down to feast. A mysterious, melancholic, oddly reveberating horn theme joins in on the boings and gurgles to end the piece. 

With Yo La Tengo re-scoring the nature films of Jean Painleve recently, it becomes all the more crucial to hear Pierre Henry's original slithering and carbonated contribution to "Les Amours de la Pleuvre" (1964), which makes up half of Volume Three. Matching the onscreen movements of the octopus, Henry wags disturbing tentacles around the loud French narration, dropping in cavernous water drops between all the wiggling sounds, and making it all feel as clausterphobic as if you were yourself in its clutches underwater. 

Another Kotonski soundtrack, for "Labyrinthe" (dir. Lenica, 1962), ends the series. Pianos, black boughs, and looming maze walls are all set to vibrate in the shadows, along with some chilling laughter and odd chatters. The wind breathes ominously, and one cannot help but to put this in the changer next Halloween. While overall sound quality is hissy due to generational dubbing, the scope of these three volumes is of crucial historical value. If only these films could be so readily retrieved for each listen. 

Scott Bartlett - OffOn (1968)

 

"To shoot this masterpiece — the most beholden to San Francisco’s psychedelic subculture in this series — Bartlett and some pals took film loops and liquid light-show projections designed for hippie concert halls and ran it through TV gear, creating the first experimental marriage of video and film. To add that artisan touch, he hand-dyed the film strips with food coloring. A close-up plunge into a cosmic eye opens into a nine-minute smorgasbord of analog cybernetica, whose loop-de-loop of form and emptiness culminates in spooky insectoid squiggles and hyperkinetic Roschach blots. 

"The edgy electronic soundtrack, crafted by Manny Meyer on a Buchla 100, is equally far-out."

- TechGnostic guru-not-guru Erik Davis, first installment of  a series called Distended Animations - on experimental animation and trip films, mostly out of the West Coast -  he's doing for HILOBROW. 

microtelevision

Recently I participated in a project called microtelevision pulled together by outernational audio imprint Artetetra, "an experiment in imaginal PSAs, digital folklore and non-narrative infotainment". Basically it's lots and lots of YouTube playlists of cool shit curated by oddball types, mostly musicians in the same online milieu that Artetetra moves within. 

My contribution is an immense (and still growing) playlist of experimental animation, visual music, and weird short films titled Dreams Built By Hand  - an offshoot of this blog, although I forgot the significant comma in Dreams, Built By Hand. 

The Artetetra project is a finite entity, so for the permanent link to the playlist, go here. But do check out the other great stuff at microtelevision. 

Below is my introductory text to the playlist, which serves as an explanation for this blog too: 

It was music that actually led me into the world of 20th Century experimental animation. 

I noticed that some of my favorite avant-garde electronic composers had provided the scores to various films: Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle both made music for Piotr Kamler, a Polish animator transplanted to France, while his erstwhile compatriots Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk  drew on the eerie abstractions of composers like Wlodzimierz Kotonski  and Eugeniusz Rudnik.The makers of the films sought out music as alien and futuristic – or surreal and creepy – as the moving images they created.  Sometimes that was from established composers;  other times from lesser known people  of their acquaintance who had institutional access to synthesisers or studios at universities. In some cases, animators like Norman McLaren and Jeff Keen, created their own peculiar scores, using various methods. In McLaren’s case, this involved a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” whereby he literally scored the film, scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips.  

The connection with avant-garde sound makes sense because much of this animation is so abstract it falls into a category that scholars call “visual music”.  So there’s a reversibility at work: two art forms united through their shared synesthetic ambition. Animation in its most radical, pure form is aspiring to the condition of music; music, in its most radical, adventurous form, is trying to create moving pictures in your mind.

Another parallel between experimental music and experimental animation is that much of the work involves a do-it-yourself, outsider ethos. Just as there is a whole tradition within avant-garde music of inventing instruments (Percy Grainger’s assemblages of ready-made household equipment like vacuum cleaners to invent sound-generating machines, Harry Partch and his gamelan-like percussive constructions), likewise in experimental animation, it is usually a lone operator, maybe occasionally a duo, creating these projects over a long period of time. You often have an obsessive, eccentric individual, like Harry Smith, devising their own techniques and spending months or years painstakingly assembling these works.

Hence the playlist title “Dreams Built By Hand”. It’s almost all animation from the pre-digital era. The means of production is manual, laboriously fiddly, time-consuming, and it involves working with the stubbornly material realm of the analogue. Techniques range from widespread ones like drawing cels and stop-motion using puppets, models, paper cut-outs, etct o more bizarre, self-invented modes (Julian Antonisz’s “non-camera films” that involve painting directly onto the surface of the celluloid film, Ferenc Cakó’s patterns drawn in sand, etc).  

These literally hand-made movies have a certain quality that is phenomenologically different from digital animation. The illusionism at work feels like magic, in both senses: conjuring tricks, and the uncanny and sorcerous. A creaky kind of artificial life is created before your disbelieving eyes.